Microsoft announces Visual Basic 6.0

Microsoft Corporation on Tuesday "announced" Visual Basic 6.0, which willbe released September 2nd, along with the other components of Visual Studio6.0. The product was demoed extensively last week at TechEd, so the official announcement is a little behind for some reason. In any event,Visual Basic 6.0 will finally adopt the OLE DB-based ActiveX Data Objects(ADO) data access model as the default method to access databases, thoughthe product adds few other features when compared to VB 5.0.

One new feature of note, however, is the WebClass Designer, which allowsdevelopers to create data-aware Web applications that are Web browserindependent. The feature works with a special VB 6.0 server component thatmust be installed on an IIS-based Web server. The tool gives VB developerssomething similar to Active Server Pages (ASP), a server-side scriptingsolution that also runs on IIS.

Aside from this, the additions to VB 6.0 are few. The debugger now supportsMicrosoft Transaction Server (MTS) debugging, and there is native supportfor Oracle databases